RIO DE JANEIRO — A Brazilian court Tuesday ordered the arrest and retrial of a rancher acquitted of orchestrating the murder of an American nun in the Amazon.
Para state’s top court reversed last year’s not-guilty verdict for Vitalmiro Moura on a technicality, a court spokesman said.
“We got him,” federal prosecutor Felicio Pontes said. “All the lies and fabrications around this case have now died.”
Pontes, who has not been assigned to Moura’s case but is prosecuting another rancher accused of involvement, said Moura is still free.
Calls to Moura’s last-known defense attorney were not immediately answered.
Moura is accused of masterminding the 2005 shooting death of 73-year-old Dorothy Stang. A native of Dayton, Ohio, Stang spent three decades on the Amazon’s wild frontier, working to preserve the rain forest and defend the rights of poor settlers whose lands were seized by powerful ranchers.
Prosecutors contend Moura and rancher Regivaldo Galvao hired gunmen to kill Stang over a disputed plot of land.
Moura has already been tried twice in the case. He was found guilty by a state court in 2007 and sentenced to 30 years in prison. But that ruling was overturned last year after the man who confessed to shooting Stang recanted earlier testimony, insisting that he’d acted alone. Gunman Ray-fran das Neves Sales was sentenced to 28 years in prison.
The court ruled Tuesday that Moura and Sales must be retried because a video that Moura’s defense showed the jury should not have been used as evidence. The video, made by the defense team, showed a defendant saying that Moura had nothing to do with the case.
